Highlights from day one: EUROPE versus WOMEN, part one

When you want to change the world, the first question to ask is 'who makes the decisions?' During the first day of the Wide conference, Amandine Bach challenged the conference participants to find these (in)visible forces in Europe. In a heated debate, Bach kept returning to that one important question: 'How can we challenge the main policy actors that shape women's position?'


By Mirjana Dokmanovic

Finding the answers to this question is not an easy task. To start with, the participants of the Parallel Session 'Europe, Europeans & European global players of today in the context of globalisation' had difficulties on agreeing about the concept of 'Europe'. Keywords started to buzz around the room: Democracy! Human rights! Diversity! But also: Migrants! Sexism! Fortress! Consumerism! And not to forget, a hypocritical attitude of paternalism toward the South. Europe shows itself as a social democracy, but it cannot hide the fact that Europe is first and foremost market oriented, in which corporations play a crucial role.

The session participants identified corporations, governments, and citizens as angles of a triangular constructed Europe. These many faces of Europe bring both opportunities and threats. It enables economic development, but at the same time, it produces unemployment, insecurity and demands opening up national economies to big European corporate players in favor of very small elite.
So, how can we, as feminists, react?



This article has been published in Daily Visions 10-10-2008